


the only one I ever believed in.

by leavethekeys



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Cancer Arc (X-Files), Canon Compliant, Episode: s05e01-02 Redux, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Smut, MSR, Post-Cancer Arc (X-Files), Post-Episode: s05e04 Detour, Resolved Sexual Tension, Romance, Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-25 01:12:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18561403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leavethekeys/pseuds/leavethekeys
Summary: "They don’t talk about this strange truce between them, an Antartica that lay beyond the boundaries of partners and best friends and lovers, an iceberg all their own." a post-cancer arc pre-emily arc bit of fluff. MSR.





	the only one I ever believed in.

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: this is an ode to my favorite part of x-files, that little sweet spot in season five between the end of the cancer arc & the beginning of the emily arc. i feel like this is a pretty underappreciated moment in msr & wanted to give it some love. in my eyes, this is when things really started to shift between the two of them. move over, season seven! 
> 
> this is also the most ridiculous, tooth-rotting fluff i have ever written so if that's your jam, you're welcome.

_ you're the only one I ever believed in _  
_the answer that could never be found_  
_the moment you decided to let love in_  
_now I'm banging on the door of an angel_  
_the end of fear is where we begin_  
_the moment we decided to let love in_

_ let love in - the goo goo dolls _

 

As she’s dying, her skin worn paper-thin as vellum against her razor-sharp cheekbones and angular chin, all running rivulets of blue veins and dark circles pressed deeply beneath the hollow of her eyes, he has never hated himself more. People had died because of Mulder’s mistakes before - innocent people, cut down before him by some incomprehensible entity or, worse still, a perfectly normal human being with murder in their heart. While death and decay were not strangers to Mulder, in fact, they were near-cousins to him at this point, it was something entirely different to witness Scully’s death, rendered achingly slow and agonizing as she drifted away in a matter of months. 

_You did this to her._

Courts the mistake of a lifetime with a man who puffs surreptitiously on a pack of Morley’s, who’s relation to him is covered in decades-old subterfuge. 

_She will die because of you._

Snarls at a doctor with pure rage flooding his veins, liquid-hot and scorching, tears stinging at the corners of his eyes as Skinner pins him against the hospital wall and spits in his face. 

_You have killed the love of your life with your insufferable quest._

Weeps broken penitence and prays to nothing and everything for her safety into her soft, frail fist beneath the cover of darkness. He thinks he sees her eyelash flutter as a wracking sob escapes him. 

_There is no price you won’t pay to learn the disappointing truth._

Stares Bill Scully in the eyes and cannot bear the knowledge that he has murdered two Scully sisters for the price of one lackluster truth. _One sorry son of a bitch speaking._

_You didn’t deserve her._

Kisses her, guilty and stricken, on her soft cheek and hand and brushes her unwashed hair from her forehead as she begs him to put the blame on her for the murder. He stares into her red-rimmed eyes and wills himself to memorize the fine features of her lovely aquiline features because they will be six feet under before the week is over. 

When the miracle of a lifetime happens, Mrs. Scully’s voice is quaking and trilling over his cellphone and it’s the best news he’s ever heard and he knows he does not deserve this miracle. He didn’t deserve her salvation - but Scully and her family certainly did, so he lingers in the hallway, wiping tears he can’t explain from his cheeks as he stares at a bloodstained photograph and questions his paternity. Eventually, Bill and Scully’s mother slip out of the room and down the hallway, Bill’s long arm across his mother’s shoulder and they do not look at him as he quietly slides into Scully’s room, a thief in the night to squander their loved one’s vitality. 

It is nothing short of a miracle how completely her demeanor has changed. She turns to greet him with a smile, the first in months, the lines crinkling around her twinkling blue eyes as she looks up from a worn leather book he assumes is a Bible left for her by the hospital’s elderly chaplain.

“Hey,” she says softly.

“Hey yourself,” he grins, feeling the tearstains on his cheeks stretch with the movement. “How long till I can break you outta here?”

“Tomorrow morning.” He sits on her bed and takes her hand in his, running his fingers over her knobbly reddened knuckles. He feels an erratic impulse to kiss them and takes it, meeting her eyes as he does. 

“You’ve… been different,” she murmurs, watching him. “since I was admitted.”

“Have I?” He says innocently, pressing her hand to his cheek. Her hand falls open and she holds his cheek in her hand, skin cool to the touch, but not nearly as frigid as they were this morning when she clung to him as he tore himself away to face his judgment. 

“Mm. Sweeter.It’s… well, it’s different,” she mumbles, glancing down. 

“Is it bad?” He asks, watching her.

“No,” she breathes, running her fingers through the mop of his hair with a careful touch. “No, not at all, Mulder.” 

He stays with her until the small hours of the night, watching endless reruns on the staticky television and patiently feeding her chocolate pudding until she pleads for him to stop, chocolate smeared on her nose and cheek. “I can feed myself!” She giggles, taking the spoon from him. 

“Are Bill and your mom getting you in the morning?” 

“No, actually, Bill’s going back to the ship in the morning and Mom wanted to be there with him. I won’t be seeing Mom until the evening.”

“In that case, can I take you home?”

“Take me home and then on another X-File?” There is a little hardness in her voice. 

He laughs. “I figured I’d give you at least twelve hours to recuperate from terminal cancer, Scully.” He kisses her cheek one last time, tasting sterile chocolate pudding on his tongue, and sleeps for three hours before returning to find her in a wheelchair in the waiting room, dressed in a pale pink cardigan and denim jeans, a hand-knitted afghan in her lap.

“Grandma,” he grins rakishly. “So good to see you!” He bends over double to kiss her cheek. There’s an unmistakable flush rendering her skin warm and plump. 

“Shut up and wheel me out of here, Mulder.” 

He obeys, basking in the opportunity to take care of her for once in their partnership and she doesn’t seem to mind too much, allowing him to take her overnight bag from the nurse and even scoop her from the wheelchair and into the waiting car and tuck her blanket in her lap without too much protest.

“This is ridiculous,” she protests meekly as he brushes an errant strand of hair from her forehead. 

“Your blood sugar is ridiculously low, Ms. Scully, as well as you’re anemic and clinically underweight. It is doctor’s orders to baby you until you recover.”

“If I didn’t know better, Mulder, I’d think you enjoyed it.”

“Whatever in the world gave you that idea?” He smiles, winding his free hand into hers. 

Enjoy it he does. He watches her feast on peanut-butter-and-banana pancakes at her favorite diner and they split an icy vanilla milkshake together which he downs with a hearty helping of black coffee. She is light, air, fire, and beauty in that diner, full morning sun cleansing her of illness and rendering her free and bright and _alive_. He takes her home and helps her settle in, making a nest of blankets and pillows on her couch and piling her high with every possible amenity she could want. There is a pervading pleasure in taking care of her that he didn’t recognize before and he finds himself with her tucked under his arm, still fragile and chilly but _alive_ , goddammit. 

“Thank you for taking care of me,” she whispers over a Bob Ross replay. 

“Of course,” he says into her hair, kissing her forehead.

She tilts her head up to look him full in the face. It is not unusual to be this close to her, but there is something different and fluttering in this gesture. She cocks her head to the side curiously, blue eyes scanning his face for something he doesn’t know. 

“Mulder,” she murmurs and kisses him. 

It is soft, quiet, and chaste. It is the sort of kiss that happens so quietly and gently that your heart forgets to pound and your blood doesn’t know to thrum and then she pulls away and she’s blinking her big blue eyes at him.

“You didn’t… didn’t have to do that,” he finds himself mumbling, embarrassed but delighted. 

“But I wanted to, Mulder.” And she kisses him again and there is something deeper there, her lithe tongue brushing against his bottom lip and her hands finding their way to his face and neck, raking fire as they go, marking him as hers, hers, hers. This time, his heart beats raucously, drum-like and foreboding in his chest and he’s certain she can feel it with her hand splayed across his sternum and her breath is hot and warm and fucking _alive_ against his cheek. He takes the opportunity for all it’s worth and peppers her with a thousand apologetic kisses across her face, a dozen on each cheek and savoring the soft skin of her neck and jaw, careful not to mar the marble perfection of the column of her neck in his recklessness to love her. He is rewarded with tiny moans and gasps, squeaky and hitching, bubbling from her breast and captured by his lips. 

They kiss, quiet and fumbling as teenagers until Scully reminds him patiently that her mother will be over in fifteen and he can stay if he wants, but Mulder shakes his head and ensures she’s taken care of before excusing himself for the evening. He feels manic and powerful the rest of the evening, running on a high unlike the ketamine that had surged in his system less than a month ago, a gaudy attempt at exorcizing demons that were paying a mortgage in his psyche. 

He’s over at her apartment nearly every day that week after work, bringing her food and word of the machinations unfolding at the Bureau. She is growing more hearty and full of life by the day, and soon enough she’s a welcome, lovely sight in the basement again, criticizing his report of the ice core samples with a scarlet pen and flourish. 

Neither of them mention the several dozen kisses and intimate moments exchanged between them in the past week; perhaps it’s understood to leave whatever _that_ had been on her pinstriped couch and hospital waiting rooms, for they had much bigger and more terrifying fish to fry before them. When she was convalescing at home, perhaps he had fantasized a little they were nothing more than dating. It was somewhat different to have her back in the office and the field.

“My mom sent me a recipe for lobster chowder,” Scully casually mentions as she’s collecting her things to leave for the day. “I’m going to make it tonight. I don’t think I’ll be able to eat it all myself.” 

He looks up from his microscope, conflicted and questioning. 

“I could also use help boiling the lobster,” she says then, head cocked.

“I’ll uh… finish up, change, then head over,” he mumbles to the bacteria he’s analyzing. 

When she leaves the smile plastered on his sorry face cracks every fissure in his broken heart anew. He goes and he gets his fingers pinched by the fresh lobster and drinks white wine and fine cheese till his head is spinning and heart aching anew.

They don’t talk about this strange truce between them, an Antartica that lay beyond the boundaries of _partners_ and _best friends_ and _lovers_ , an iceberg all their own. Scully’s mother mentions it with a crinkling smile and Bill, on the phone to Scully, disparages it in his own prickly Naval captain way and even Skinner makes a small comment in passing to Mulder.

“Things been better, with you two?” He asks, not looking up from the case report.

“Excuse me?” Mulder questions.

“You and Scully. Been looking a lot… happier,” Skinner gruffs at him, looking pained. 

“I uh… yeah. Scully’s been doing great,” Mulder says, embarrassed. 

“Happy for you,” Skinner says disparagingly as he tosses the report back. “I made some corrections in red. Fix them and put them in my box by end of the day. Dismissed.” 

Scully is as conflicted and confused as Mulder when he relays the message, and they’re even more troubled with they receive orders to attend a retreat in Palm Springs with the intention of building teamwork and communication skills. Skinner hands it to them personally with an off-handed comment about a lovely beach in the area. 

While Mulder dreaded these sort of “teamwork exercises”, it didn’t escape his attention that Scully was, possibly, _excited_ at the idea and he caught her, more than once, with a magazine of swimsuit models that looked apter on his desk than hers. He didn’t say anything other than a comment that he quite liked the blue one. 

He’s almost sad by the interruption of moss men and their lives in danger once more, but he savors the memory of her cradling him in her warm, small lap, singing under her breath in the most charming, off-key monotone a song he hadn’t heard since he was a little boy, a smile creeping on her lips as she hums _“If I were the king of the world…_ ” and he sleeps better in that musty forest than he had in decades. 

After Mulder makes good on his promise of wine and cheese and furniture towers and they sit, cross-legged in pajamas, on her hotel room bed as Unsolved Mysteries plays on mute in the background. 

“This is weird,” Mulder finally blurts.

“What’s weird, Mulder?” Scully looks up coyly from her plastic cup of cheap red wine. 

“This… thing.” 

“What thing?”

“Between us.” 

“Which is…?”

“Oh… you… know.” He flails his hand in her direction with uncertainty. She laughs, bubbling and mellifluous.

“No, I don’t think I do know, Mulder. What do you mean?”

He exhales harshly. “Scully. Please. This… new… _intimacy_.” 

“Mmmm.” She hums around a slice of cheese in her mouth. “Yeah. It is a little weird, I guess.” 

“What… where did it… come from?” He stammers, terrified but willing himself to seek out these answers from her. 

“I could ask you the same thing, Mulder. It takes two to tango, after all.” 

“I just… want to, I guess? I… always… want to. But before, it seemed… like you hated it. But now, you… reciprocate.”

“You’re right,” she murmurs. “I did hate it. It hurt, to… encourage you, because I felt that I couldn’t allow myself to… pursue something undue in a professional environment again.”

“What changed?” 

“Almost dying,” she says dryly. “It changed everything. But… while I was lying in that hospital bed, contemplating my mortality, contemplating your fate, I think I came to an understanding that there is already _so much_ to… our relationship that is unduly and unprofessional. Hell, Bill was convinced, when he saw you kiss my hand, that we were an item. That’s why he was so hard on you.” 

“That’s the only reason he hates me, huh?”

She shrugs. “Bill is… Bill. A stickler for rules, one of the boys, deathly protective of Missy and I. You represent everything he fights against. To him, you’re an unruly sailor to take to captain’s mast.”

“Captain’s mast?”

“Formal reprimand.”

“Huh.” He sips his wine, watching Scully’s fine features highlighted by the fluorescent lighting. “I think no matter what we do, they’re going to use us, use _this,_ against us. I care for you more than anyone, and regardless of the physical, that would never change.”

“Mmm.” She nods. “And I feel the same.” Her voice is achingly soft and she reaches out to caress his cheek. He feels a strange fire flood his veins, twisting and throbbing, and reaches across the divide of styrofoam plate and grabs her heart-shaped face in both hands and kisses her soundly. 

“We’re consorting,” she whispers between his lovesick kisses, returning his ardor with roving hands at his shoulders and chest. “it’s against… the rules, Mulder.”

“Fuck the rules,” he grins into her soft neck. “I think there’s a forecast of sleeping bags.” 

“Let me… let me…” she pulls away from him just long enough to lock the door, turn down the blinds and curtains, and shut off all the lights. While she moves across the room he clears off the paperwork and food from the bed and lies back on the hotel bed, willing his heart to wind down from a full-on sprint and find a pace more manageable. 

He’s lost track of her when she slides beneath the bedspread. He can barely see her in the darkness as he moves beneath the blankets and he reaches for her. His breath is taken away when his hands swipe across impossibly hot, bare flesh. Without his knowing she’d managed to wriggle out of her Special Agent Scully pantsuit and in just a sheer camisole and panties. He wants to know the color, the lace pattern, everything about it, and he tries to educate himself by touch alone, palming over the curious softness and the hardness of her curvature.

“You don’t… have to do this,” he finds himself stammering as if he could even stop the bloodtide surging within him, spurring him to palm the tender flesh of her breast as he speaks.

“Oh, Mulder…” Scully presses her hot mouth against his, tongue probing and fingers finding the flesh beneath his white undershirt, “but I _want_ to.” 

It’s enough. It’s more than enough. How could he begin to fight this? How many times had he entertained the phantasm of her above, below, beside him, naked and willing and glorious bare flesh, and, above all, _alive_? He was hers with the smallest crook of her finger, had been since she’d laughed, open-mouthed and hysterical, in the pouring rain of Bellefleur with him. She had his heart and soul in its entirety; what more was his flesh? It wasn’t worth much to him. But she, she could use it, give it a new purpose.

She’s greedy and hungry, something that surprises him. For some reason, he had always envisioned this union as something tentative and virginal, but he should have known Scully’s appetites by now. Perhaps he’d been ignoring them. She kisses him until the room is spinning and then lets him catch his breath as she captures the lobe of his ear between her teeth, tongue laving and dragging the soft flesh between her canine and chuckling darkly in his ear when he groans and bucks up into her helplessly. 

Her name is a prayer on his lips as she works her way down his body with teeth and tongue and impossibly soft lips. She tugs down his jeans with a professional touch, but she is tender and cruel when she encircles his cock with a small, hot hand, and he has to cast his mind to things like baseball cards when she takes him into her mouth. He’s glad he can’t see the impossibly erotic sight of her, those lips encircling him, or it would be over as soon as it began. 

“Oh fuck,” he gasps. “Oh, _fuuuuck_ , oh Scully…” she hums around him in response, tongue slipping around him easily and lithely. 

“Please, please, please…”

“Mmm?” 

“C’mere,” he pleads, grabbing her shoulders bodily. She obeys and gasps as he claws her body up his, past his stomach and chest and settles her heat on his face. 

“M-M-Mulderrr… - _ohhhh_ ,” she cries desperately as he encircles her ass and hips with his arms and broad, splayed hands and tongues the musky wetness of her panties. Cotton, by the texture, and lacey and devilishly sheer. He casually nudges them aside and drags her down onto him and is rewarded by her muffled cries. She must be covering her mouth with a hand. 

He doesn’t stop until she climaxes, convulsing helpless and trembling around his tongue, his face covered in the evidence of her pleasure. Has she ever been more alive to him than this, so heartbreakingly human and vulnerable for him? She slumps over him, gripping the wooden headboard like a life raft and struggles to catch his breath. He peppers her shuddering thighs with kisses until she swings her leg over and settles beside him.

“Let's sleep,” he whispers, holding his arms out for her. She cuddles into his embrace, but he can feel her looking at him.

“What about..?” She asks questioningly. 

He laughs, shaking his head. “Trust me, I’m more than good.”

She kisses him then, soft at first, then probing and curious. “You taste like me,” she breathes against him. “That’s so… hot.” 

He laughs against her. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you describe _anything_ as hot.”

“Shut up, Mulder.” 

Those scant weeks between her miraculous recovery and the heartrending destruction of Emily were some of the best in his entire life. She laughed easily in the field and outside of work, unfettered by sorrow and heartbreak, happy only to be alive, grateful they had escaped the cruelty of fate once more with only each other to depend on. 

There is nothing he wouldn’t give to grant her that joy again. 

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: thanks so much for reading! i should have written my final essay instead of writing this but oh well lmao 
> 
> go bother me on my tumblr: http://firewlkr.tumblr.com/


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